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Quotation
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On life and desperation by Henry David Thoreau |
 
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David Gurteen's comments: In saying this Thoreau believed that the pursuit of success and wealth has paradoxically cheapened our lives.
Quotations from Henry David Thoreau:  Nature is not, of course, always benign and beautiful. It can be frightening and terrifying also.
Not too many generations ago, raw nature and wilderness tended to inspire fear and dread in "civilized" people. They represented Otherness and the Unknown. That which is "wild" is also "bewildering". Today, wilderness is usually considered to be something good and in need of preservation. The beauty and awesomeness of it dominate our attention. We are attracted by wilderness, the Otherness of it, the sense it is something inevitably outside of us. Always beyond us, it is what is ultimately real. We cannot adequately appreciate this aspect of nature if we approach it with any taint of human pretense. It will elude us if we allow artifacts like clothing to intervene between ourselves and this Other. To apprehend it, we cannot be naked enough. In Wildness is the preservation of the world. Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for somethhing.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author It is not enough to be busy ... The question is: What are we busy about?Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate himself by conscious endeavor.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author Our life is frittered away by detail ... Simplify, Simplify.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg to-day and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night; I have travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the mean while have earned your fare, and arrive there some time to-morrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached around the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you; and as for seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should have to cut your acquaintance altogether. Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all at length will ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, - and it will be called, and will be, "A melancholy accident," No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time. This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once. "What!" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?" Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt. Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperationHenry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever. Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author Nothing can be more useful to a man than the determination not to be hurried.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.
If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy.Henry David Thoreau, (1817 - 1862) American Author
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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation
